Mike Waltz wants America to focus on the threat from China

“DAMMIT, DAMNNATONATONATONATOUS , damn, damn!” A young Afghan girl lay dead and Mike Waltz seethed in frustration. An Afghan police unit working with Green Berets under Mr Waltz’s command had killed the child with indiscriminate gunfire unleashed in response to a Taliban attack. The shooting was justifiable but the police had ignored their training, Mr Waltz writes in “Warrior Diplomat”, a memoir published a decade ago about his combat service and tours as a Washington policymaker. The book doubles as a primer on the causes of America’s military failure in Afghanistan and an intellectual autobiography of the man has selected to be his national security adviser.Mr Waltz is amply qualified for his new role, which involves managing and co-ordinating inter-agency processes. But he models a distinctly Trumpian version of a job often given to Ivy League-educated strategists. Mr Waltz’s credentials are long on the school of life and short on erudite studies of Machiavelli and Sun Tzu. He retired from the army as a lieutenant colonel after earning four Bronze Stars, two for valour. After winning election to the House of Representatives from Florida in 2018, Mr Waltz evolved into an ardent acolyte of Mr Trump while serving on the three big national-security committees in the lower chamber: armed services, foreign affairs and intelligence.Mr Waltz is an outspoken China hawk but also thinks America made wrong turns in Afghanistan and Iraq, and should learn its lessons in hubris, as well as in equipping its strategy with the right resources. As a Fox News regular during the election campaign, he relentlessly attacked the foreign-policy record of Kamala Harris and the Biden administration. He was able to endow ’s America First, Beijing-bashing rhetoric with more coherence than the candidate himself could often manage. On the eve of the vote, in written for with Matthew Kroenig, a Georgetown professor, Mr Waltz argued that, if elected, a second Trump administration should quickly wind up the conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, to free up military assets to confront and deter China.The premise of this agenda is questionable: if winding up Middle Eastern wars was easy, there wouldn’t be so many of them. On Ukraine, Mr Waltz started out as a hawk but evolved to align with Mr Trump’s scepticism about American involvement. In his essay for he dismissed providing aid to Ukraine indefinitely as a “recipe for failure”. Yet if Mr Putin refuses to talk, he noted, America can “provide more weapons to Ukraine with fewer restrictions” than the Biden administration imposed on Kyiv. Such an escalation would “probably” bring Mr Putin to the bargaining table. He does not say what he would recommend if it doesn’t.Mr Waltz has not advocated leaving , but European readers of “Warrior Diplomat” may be unsettled by his bracing criticisms of the alliance’s performance in Afghanistan. “Most of the militaries, even the supposedly elite units, had seriously atrophied after years of paltry defence spending,” Mr Waltz writes. “The lack of equipment coupled with the lack of sophisticated intelligence operations and the unwritten caveats [limiting combat operations]...meant that units often did more harm than good.”His criticism contains some hard truths, but one can hope that Mr Waltz recognises that his experiences are dated. The expeditionary war in Afghanistan initiated in support of America more than two decades ago is a poor basis for evaluating how to strengthen European self-defence against Russian aggression today. If Mr Waltz allows his Afghan experiences to distort his views on , he could enable Mr Trump’s worst (and often uninformed) instincts about the alliance at a time of elevated peril.On China, Mr Waltz sometimes echoes the existential rhetoric of the early cold war: “I for one will fight to the end to ensure the United States and the free world do not one day bow to the Chinese communist party,” he wrote on X in 2021. If Mr Trump carries out his campaign promises to slap 60% tariffs on China, expect Mr Waltz to press the public case for confrontation. Yet Mr Waltz is a thoughtful, fair-minded ideologue who is comfortable with complications, his memoir makes clear.His temperament may help him referee and manage debates in the Situation Room—deliberations marked by an extraordinary amount of yelling and digression during Mr Trump’s first term, according to memoirs by participants. As a retired colonel, Mr Waltz may have to assert himself with Pentagon generals and admirals who measure colleagues by the number of stars on their shoulders.He will bring to his new job one clear lesson from his prior experience of Washington: interagency decision-making on national-security matters almost always suffers from “unrealistic timelines or no timeline at all”, he writes. One timeline Mr Waltz may not wish to dwell on is his own. During Mr Trump’s first term, often frustrated by the advice he received from headstrong aides, the president ran through four national security advisers in four years.